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Benchmarks Of The Gentoo-based Sabayon

01-04-2010, 03:00 AM

Phoronix: Benchmarks Of The Gentoo-based Sabayon

For those looking to experiment with a Gentoo-based Linux system but are not looking forward to the obstacles of installing Gentoo itself, an easier and quicker approach can be to use a distribution like Sabayon Linux. Sabayon uses pre-compiled x86 and x86_64 packages for installing the Linux distribution from its LiveDVD and uses their own Entropy system for package management, though these binary packages are compiled from Gentoo's Portage and using the Portage system is still available. The LiveDVD installer is also very easy to use and is just like using Ubuntu's Ubiquity or Red Hat's Anaconda. With all the benchmarking though of Ubuntu and Fedora as of late on Phoronix, we found it time to put out some benchmarks of Sabayon Linux. Up today are benchmarks from the recently released Sabayon 5.1 along with the older Sabayon 4.2 and for comparison is Kubuntu 9.10.

Comment

Thank You Michael for looking at something not Ubuntu
I'm a little bit disappointed that the article is kind of superficial.
There is no real background, difference or any other useful info like installation "flavors". BTW, Sabayon uses Red Hat's Anaconda installer and not "like".
I have to admit that article is about what was stated in title.
IMHO, "real" articles are what we (readers) want.
By "real" i mean not only 10 benchmark graphs.
But also more useful info. After reading this article you probably will not try it.
It's like "We know well Mazda (Ubuntu) and now we will learn about Toyota (Sabayon) by comparing max speaker volume and break lights intensity."
If you need help, just ask. At least few readers will be happy to help.
Why i'm not doing it by myself ? Because I can only help with this.

Comment

Meh! Sabayon is not as fast as I thought since it's Gentoo based. But that's normal since it uses prebuilt generic x86_64 binaries.

Yup, they're prebuilt, some obviously with slightly different optimization
parameters than others, considering some of the larger differences. It's
great to see a non-Ubuntu distro for a change. Gentoo would be too much,
ofcourse, since any gains are quickly offset by sheer compilation time.

As a system for benchmarking x86 vs x64, though, Gentoo makes sense, cause
you can have optimization parameters such as SSE1/2/3, -O2/3 and similar
under control as opposed to Ubuntu/Debian where apparently some of these
are being set only at the x64 level.

Once more, credits to Michael for 'rocking the boat' a little bit
Keep up the good work!

Comment

Also i vote to set a filesystem standard for benchmarks. Use ext4 as filesystem even when it is not the default one. Then differences could also happen due to different default from one kernel to the next, but usually should be similar with the same kernel version (unless those defaults are patched or changed in the /etc/fstab).

Comment

Yup, they're prebuilt, some obviously with slightly different optimization
parameters than others, considering some of the larger differences. It's
great to see a non-Ubuntu distro for a change. Gentoo would be too much,
ofcourse, since any gains are quickly offset by sheer compilation time.

As a Gentoo user i can tell you that "Sheer Compilation Time" is a myth
For example, it takes 56 seconds to install Firefox from source.
To recompile the whole thing with over 1K packages is less then 7 hours (I don't measure it usually and the "emerge -j 5 -vuNDe world" executed once something severely broken or something like GCC updated)
Again, the average package installation takes same time is precompiled binary.
And i'm talking about Q9300 with 4GB RAM... It's not fastest computer in any way. But you do need a lot of RAM. The trick is to use RAM disk (autofs) for portage work folder. But, RAM is cheap

Comment

I don't know how much does it take to compile Firefox on a quad core,
but i know how much it takes to do it on a single 2GHz Mobile Sempron
core, and let me tell you... it's bordering with 'not worth it".
(the usual dependencies of mozilla-firefox are about an hour or so).

Just yesterday it took me about 2-3 hours to compile Qt 4.6.1 and about
an hour and a half for recompiling KDE 4.3.4 afterwards. So in a way,
yes, the 'sheer compilation time' is a rather substantial variable here
at "clavko's". However, I'm an enthusiast and prefer to do it my own way.
I don't expect anyone with a less than dual core try and copy me.